When his father, having completed the grammar, died of boredom and old age, Billy came back to Brensham and we knew at once that the whisky held him in its power as no woman could ever do. We could see him hurrying down to the Trumpet or the Adam and Eve at a quarter to ten in the morning, in order to be there exactly at opening-time; we would watch how his hand shook as he lifted the first glass, how it became curiously steady after the third; we would notice the bulge in his pocket as he tottered home after closing-time. A few well-meaning people tried to help him: but most of us knew that it was already too late and we accepted Billy for what he was: a hopeless, incurable, incorrigible drunkard. His father had left him a good deal of money, and he spent it in a few years. Then he sold the house, and the library, and the furniture, and took a room above Mrs Doan’s shop. Then he sold his car and bought a motor-bike; sold the motor-bike; borrowed from moneylenders; and in his last extremity borrowed from his friends. At this juncture, when everybody was saying that he had come to the end of his tether, he received a lucky windfall: an uncle died and left him some money but, knowing Billy, appointed two trustees to prevent him from squandering it. These hard-hearted men (as Billy described them to us) doled him out the sum of three pounds a week and by dint of borrowing, sponging, and forgetting to pay Mrs Doan (who adored him) he contrived to keep himself headed for a toper’s grave, though of necessity his pace towards it became slower. In the fruit season he hired himself out, for he had no silly pride, to the farmers for plum-picking and cherry-picking. On one hot July day, being extremely drunk, he fell off a twenty-rung ladder on to his head. A sober man would have broken his neck; but the only effect it had on Billy was to make him slightly more lachrymose after his outbursts of poetry and slightly less controllable when the whim took him to break people’s windows.

The Scorer

Brensham possessed another poet; but this one was serious and sober, shared none of our easy-going ways, was alien in speech and spirit, and had brought with him across the border the dark and twisted puritanism of the dark valleys. He was the postman; as he called himself, Dai Roberts Postman, using his function as a surname in the Welsh fashion. He had come holidaying out of some black village in the spring of 1919, when miners had money to spend, and had fallen in love with our green hill and our snowy orchards and with one of our pink, plump village girls, so he never went back. I think he fell in love with the Syndicate’s pheasants also; he was a better poacher than a postman. However, he insisted that his true calling was neither of these: he was a poet. Long ago, in his bleak black valley, in the slate-roofed horrible Hall next to the tin bethel, an Eisteddfod had taken place; and Dai had recited a long poem before the minor bards on the theme of Sodom and Gomorrah, which had frightened them into giving him the prize. Since then he had rested upon his laurels, though he once told us that he was contemplating an epic, longer than the Mabinogion, upon the subject of The Approaching End of the World. But the great project hung fire. In our flowery countryside there were no Eisteddfodau: we indulged in profane pastimes, cricket on the village green, darts matches in the pub, dances in the village hall. The flesh-pots corrupted us, said Dai; and true poetry blossomed only in the cold slatey valleys and in the hearts of the small dark singing men.

Dai never entered any of the pubs; to do so, he believed, meant certain damnation. Nor would he ever take his plump, cheerful wife to the whist drives and dances which enlivened the winter evenings for so many of the villagers; a Baptist Minister had assured him long ago that a girl who went to dances was a sister of the Devil, and he still believed this. On Saturday afternoons, however, he was willing to watch our cricket-matches, and although he did not play the game he generously admitted that ‘he could see no great harm in it, upon a week-day’. Before long he was persuaded to score for us; and as the seasons went by the casual job became a permanent and official one, so that we took Dai with us when we played away matches and he ‘followed’ Brensham as the ardent spectators of football ‘follow’ the Arsenal or the Spurs. He kept our batting and bowling averages from match to match throughout the season, and did not forget to tell us if they were unsatisfactory. ‘One hundred and sixty runs your bowling has cost,’ he would chant, ‘for only four wick-ets! That iss an average of fifty-three point three recurring!’ Indeed in his eagerness that Brensham should win he became sharply critical of all the players. ‘Mr Moore,’ he told me, after I had most painfully missed a high catch in the deep, ‘you will not mind me saying that you would catch the ball better if you did not first let it bounce off your breastbone.’ Of Mr Mountjoy, whom he held to be idolatrous, he declared: ‘He flicks at the ball as if he were sprinkling it with holy wat-er!’ He disapproved of Mr Chorlton’s harlequin cap (which provoked him, apparently, in the same inexplicable way as Douglas Jardine’s provoked the Australians), of Sammy’s bald head - ‘A sunstroke he does deserve for being so fool-ish!’ - of the placing of the field, the choice of the bowlers, and the batting order. It was a wonder that he could bring himself to score for us at all, since our antics drove him into such despair. In any case the duties of scorer are dull and exacting. We asked him, one day, what pleasure he got out of it.

‘Like a sonnet the well-kept score-sheet iss,’ was his astonishing answer.

The Helpers

As I have said, we were proud of our cricket-teas and of the pretty girls who served them. Alfie used both as bait for ‘the boys’ when he was trying to make up the team at the last moment.